THE INMATE .

Memory of seeing a woman incarcerated in a mental institution for forty years

Submitted:May 4, 2009
Reads: 128
Comments: 3
Likes: 2

I see her still
Gazing listlessly out
Trough the barred windows
Of the refractory ward
Abject as an animal
Caged in the zoo

She is gazing out the Roundabout of history
Upon the fall of empires ;
Her world transfixed in
Those hollow corridors
And the crushed timme and space
They held within

I see her gaze across the waste of mindscape
From when an Airline crossed the vastness of the Atlantic
To when a man first walked the moon;

She looks out with glazed eye ;
Vacuously through the barred windows;
Through the ditches and brambles of memories
As the drugs pulsate within the cavern of her skull
And echo in the hollowness within ;
Endlessly and inescapably as if that sound of thought
Reverberates forever
On a tightened violin string ;
Humming ever onwards ;
Along the pylons of her neurons ;

Onwards , endlessly ,
Like the train without a terminal;
Relentlessly , to which she is oblivious and impervious
Mercifully.

Just once they tried ECT ;
Applied electrodes to her temples and
Zapped 220 volts across her brain ;
And the shelled memory ;
Tangled and entwined '
If it could
But be peeled
Back layer by layer

The layers might come away in folds which
Have hidden her memories; locked her dreams

Tethered her soul from its wandering ;
Till at last it strains no more at the leash of sense ;
Nor volition;
Never more to seek adventure
Discovery - sensual rebirth
Incarnation .

Like the hapless animal
In its cage
Waiting in a captured state
For a bell to ring
A whistle to sound

She turns away from the window
As she hears the clatter of the keys
Which lock in a myriad of times
Of girlhood , teenage years
And now late middle age
All corralled within these corridors
All crushed dark and dense
As ice is at the poles

She turns away from the world which
Has turned in space each passing day
Without her knowing;
And follows the other inmates
To the dayroom
To turn in the orbit of their company
For all their day-long days
And all its day-long gloom